From Steel City to Seattle: Founded in Pittsburgh, this video company moved west but kept its roots

GeekWire is putting its own HQ2 in Pittsburgh for the month of February 2018 — reporting on the people, technologies and ideas transforming the industrial city into an innovation powerhouse.

Panopto CEO Eric Burns. Photo via Panopto.

PITTSBURGH — The team at Panopto might be more excited than anyone else about the upcoming aerial connection from Seattle to Pittsburgh.

The enterprise video company, which raised a $42.8 million round in August 2016, got its start in Pittsburgh more than a decade ago and relocated its headquarters to Seattle in 2015. It has offices in both cities, with a majority of its 130 employees now in the Pacific Northwest.

Panopto CEO Eric Burns said Alaska Airline’s new cross-country route, which goes into effect this fall and will be the only nonstop flight offered from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to Pittsburgh International Airport, could help bring the two cities together in new ways.

“This is the beginning of hopefully a beautiful Seattle-Pittsburgh relationship, with the two cities deepening their ties in ways that would have seemed improbable a while ago,” he said.

Burns helped develop Panopto’s original technology as a senior research programmer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but the technology hadn’t yet been commercialized when he took a job at Microsoft in 2005. When Panopto launched in 2007, he ran its engineering operations out of Seattle. In 2015, Panopto officially moved its HQ to Seattle as Burns shifted from CTO to CEO.

Even with the headquarters relocation, Panopto has kept roots in Pittsburgh. A large part of the company’s finance, sales, and technical support staff remains in Pittsburgh, where they recently moved to a new, bigger office.

“We are a bicoastal company,” Burns noted.

Pittsburgh’s skyline from the Mt. Washington overlook. (Photo by Elan Mizrahi for GeekWire)

Burns brings a unique perspective about the similarities and differences between Seattle and Pittsburgh, having been both a student and senior researcher at CMU before living in Seattle for the past 12 years.

Seattle has a larger tech ecosystem given longstanding giants like Amazon and Microsoft, along with a more robust startup scene. But Burns said Pittsburgh might be a better place to start a company.

“It’s a lot less risky than starting in Seattle or Silicon Valley in terms of cost exposure, competition in the market, and other external factors that can threaten an early-stage company,” he said.

Burns said that while he was at CMU, most of his colleagues and classmates would move away after finishing their studies. That has changed as companies like Google and Uber open engineering offices in Pittsburgh. Affordable housing and a growing food scene also help.

“The quality of life in both places is high in different ways — Pittsburgh doesn’t have the metropolitan density that Seattle has, but people tend to live in larger spaces,” Burns said. “If someone wants to raise a family and have a bigger house, it’s very accessible in Pittsburgh.”

Pittsburgh’s culture is a “bit more blue collar” than Seattle, he said. There’s also something special about the “Pittsburgh charm” and interactions between citizens.

“It’s a place of incredible civic pride,” Burns explained. “Part of that is because it’s not a city of transplants like Seattle or Silicon Valley appear to be some days. The bonds in Pittsburgh are deeper than just a shared personality.”

Panopto, which hosts more than 2 million videos in its cloud, is far from the only company or institution with ties to both Seattle and Pittsburgh. There is an increasing level of collaboration between researchers and faculty from CMU and the University of Washington; for example, Professor Siddhartha Srinivasa recently joined the UW faculty from Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.

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Taylor Soper is GeekWire's managing editor, responsible for coordinating the newsroom, planning coverage, and editing stories. A native of Portland, Ore., and graduate of the University of Washington, he was previously a GeekWire staff reporter, covering beats including startups and sports technology. Follow him @taylor_soper and email taylor@geekwire.com.